January 2003
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
13h 22m
English
Content preview from UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation
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Summary
There are many different UNIX filesystems and to scratch the surface on all of them would easily fill a book of this size. The three filesystems described in the chapter represent a good cross section of filesystems from the UNIX and Linux operating systems and cover the commercial filesystem market (VxFS), the most widely documented and ported filesystem (UFS), and the most popular open source filesystems (ext2 and ext3).
Only a few other filesystems have been documented in any detail. [HANC01] describes the AdvFS filesystem developed by Digital which is the main filesystem of their True64 operating system. [KELL96] describes IBM's JFS filesystem.
To understand filesystem internals it is always best to start with one of the simple filesystems such as the original System V filesystem as documented in [LION96]. If studying Linux, the ext2 filesystem on one of the earlier kernels is a good place to start before looking at the more elaborate, and therefore more complex, filesystems.